What might an Artisan look like in 2025?
Something about Alchemy....
I have always found the idea of alchemy a valuable framework when things are unclear. The idea of a natural process, from Nigredo - the blackening as “what is” is reduced to its elements, of Albedo, the whitening, identifying what is valuable in the remains of what is, through Cintrinitas, the yellowing as what is valuable is reshaped until Rubedo, the reddening as the new emerges and is completed.
It feels like an alchemical time. Companies that worship the gods of scale find themselves flat-footed and unloved by customers, staff, and shareholders. Public organisations that aped best practices from the business world in areas like health, education, and utilities find themselves hopelessly adrift and failing to deliver, having eroded the vocational energy that powers such workplaces in favour of meaningless targets. They have no idea where to start rebuilding the social and skills infrastructures that have been capitalised and sold off to create wealth for those who will never use their services.
At the same time, we have seen spectacular growth in technology businesses that have yet to find a place in society where they belong. Their almost magical capabilities are reminiscent of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as they struggle to control what they have brought about, with far more than a tidy kitchen at stake.
And so, on this first day of the year, as the change swirls around us, I thought I would focus on what doesn’t change. For the most part, significant changes, whether the Enlightenment, the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the Internet, and now our relationship with information through AI, only change how we handle what matters, not what matters itself.
Our fundamental need for human connection and belonging persists through time, as does our search for meaning and purpose in our lives. Our hunger for trust and reciprocity is the foundation of our society, and the path we tread between cooperation and conflict doesn’t change. Our need for fairness and justice is constant.
And the key point is, I think, that there is no meaningful data on any of these qualities.
This leaves me with perhaps the most critical of our human qualities. Storytelling.
Storytelling is how we have always communicated, stored our histories, evoked imagination and kept order.
We become the stories we tell.
Artisans are those who weave what doesn’t change into what does. They host the spaces between our imaginations and the changing practices of daily life. They produce the artefacts and services that symbolise who we see ourselves as, grounding us in our identity and society, whether at a local level or connecting a diaspora. Artisans are the innovators who turn new ideas and technology into the first clunky prototypes that catalyse revolutions, and they are the mycelium that helps ideas spread.
Importantly, I think Artisans do not scale; they multiply. Scale is an industrial process; multiplication is a social one. We don’t see bigger artisans; we see more of them in times of change.
It matters because the difference between scale and multiplication is human connection, and Artisans are hosts.
Michelin-starred restaurants do not scale. To provide the service, quality, and attention that brings them the accolade, they have, on average, less than fifty covers, with the biggest being no more than a hundred. Kelly Johnson at Lockheed Martin produced the XP-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational Jet fighter in 1943 with 23 engineers in 143 days. Steve Jobs produced the first Macintosh with a team of one hundred people. Jonas Salk created the first polio vaccine with a small research team.
You get the idea.
All of them were finding ways to articulate new stories through artefacts; none entertained Lean Six Sigma or Agile, and all of them provided environments where all those human needs that cannot be measured were well and truly satisfied.
In his 1999 book “Organising Genius” Warren Bennis identified the core qualities of great groups:
1. Great Groups start with Great People
2. Great Groups and Great leaders create each other
3. Every Great Group has a strong leader
4. The leaders of great groups love great talent and know where to find it.
5. Great Groups are full of talented people who can work together
6. Great Groups think they are on a mission from God
7. Every Great Group is an island - but with a bridge to the mainland.
8. Great Groups see themselves as winning underdogs.
9. Great Groups always have an enemy.
10. People in Great Groups have blinkers on.
11. Great Groups are optimistic, not realistic.
12. In Great Groups, the right person has the right job.
13. The leaders of great groups give them what they need and free them from the rest.
14. Great Groups ship.
15. Great work is its own reward.
We might change the language a little today, but not the principles.
Great groups live in containers hosted by committed servant leaders, and those leaders exhibit all the qualities of the artisan. Commitment to beauty, curiosity, mastery of their domain, and purpose beyond profit.
Great groups do not scale; they multiply, connect, communicate and adapt. They are murmurations, not megaliths.
People. Ideas. Technology - in that order.
John Boyd
Scale is successful in the short term but self-defeating in the long term; as founders leave, bureaucrats dominate, and control replaces curiosity.
Conversely, multiplication is transformational, as distributed curiosity and exploration outpace and outmanoeuvre centralised control, and lots of small risky experiments find a way forward better than risk-averse incremental steps.
I am currently a member of five small groups, either as a host or a member. If just one member of each group goes off and creates their own small groups, and just one member of those groups does the same, we will experience exponential growth. After three iterations, we would have 125 groups, all small, all cohesive, each bureaucrat-free, dancing together around emerging challenges.
In physics, Work is only done when a force causes a displacement, and positive work occurs when the force and displacement are in the same direction. When things change, I suggest good work is far more likely to be done by coordinated small groups of artisans than by bureaucratic behemoths.
That’s the thought I’m taking into 2025.
We have work to do.
The next Outaide the Walls/New Artisans open Zoom call will be at 5 pm UK on Wednesday, 15th Jan. I’ll send links and reminders before, but you may want to pop it into your diary…
And as a close, something from John O’Donohue at this time.
Beannacht. A New Year Blessing
On the day when The weight deadens On your shoulders And you stumble, May the clay dance To balance you. And when your eyes Freeze behind The grey window And the ghost of loss Gets in to you, May a flock of colours, Indigo, red, green, And azure blue, Come to awaken in you A meadow of delight. When the canvas frays In the currach of thought And a stain of ocean Blackens beneath you, May there come across the waters A path of yellow moonlight To bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, May the clarity of light be yours, May the fluency of the ocean be yours, May the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow Wind work these words Of love around you, An invisible cloak To mind your life.